Monique Prieto on Politics, Pepys, and the Return to Oil Painting

In an interview with Afterall, Los Angeles-based painter Monique Prieto discusses her shift from abstract color fields to text-based paintings that incorporate phrases from the 17th-century diary of Samuel Pepys. Prieto explains that her turn to language was motivated by a desire to reflect the political moment without being overtly polemical. She discovered Pepys's diaries by chance in a used bookstore and was drawn to their banality and personal charge. The new works feature a blockish, graffiti-inspired font with a drop shadow illuminated from below, a choice she describes as more democratic. Prieto also returned to oil paint after fourteen years of using acrylic, seeking a richer, more nostalgic quality to balance the starkness of the words. She abandoned preliminary computer sketches in favor of direct painting, embracing improvisation and the risk of running out of space on the canvas. The interview covers her two-year break from commitments, the influence of Goya and Rogier van der Weyden, and the layered narratives—personal, art-world, and political—that run through her practice.